Require Assistance: 2 WAN/ISP's (Shaw/Telus) and RT-AC87U - ASUS

[bldk32]

My network node for Shaw Cable Internet is over-saturated!!! Gone are the days of 100MBbs so I acquired Telus DSL 50 MBps and downgraded Shaw to 50 MBps and have the RT-AC87U - ASUS. Can you see where I'm going with this? BTW I've been following Tom's Hardware for years but this is my first post.

I've tried a bunch of ways to get BOTH ISPs to integrate into the RT-AC87U - ASUS without success. I've bridged each ISP Gateway/Router into a Modem only version, disabled WIFI etc.

I read online that RT-AC87U - ASUS Dual Wan Support is not fully operational and or that if you do get it to work it's fail over or load balancing but it won't merge both WAN connections into one giving me 100 MBps. BTW I'm using Merlin for the firmware on the above router.

0. Current router RT-AC87U - ASUS
1. I also have the RT-N66U - ASUS - Dark Knight
2. I can also use my older RT-N56U in case we need it here as well.
3. Server has 2 separate 1GB Ethernet NICs

Note: I tried to connect the server directly using the 2 NICs and WAN/ISP ports on 2 routers/modems and then bridged the connections via Windows 8 and that downgraded my overall speed bigtime.

How can we make this happen and is this even the best approach? I don't care for a backup connection I'm trying to run my 2 VOIP lines and dedicated server all via ethernet at maximum bandwidth and let all other clients connect via WIFI

In total we have 25 clients for all devices/systems/laptops etc.

Open to new ideas here, both ISP's had no idea what I was talking about and ASUS never called me back as promised.

 

[bill001g]

I am unsure how well the load balancing works on the default asus firmware you could try tomato or dd-wrt.

Still you have the fundamental issue. You have 2 different ip addresses so no matter how hard you try it is not possible to combine these to increase the download rate of a single session. If you tried to connect to a server it would see traffic form 2 different IP and drop the session it is a fundamental violation of how TCP works.

What you can do assign different tcp session to different connections. In theory you could then download 2 files in parallel. There still huge problems though. The most well know are how game servers work but many banks etc have similar issues. Most games have a authentication server that you log into. You then connect to a different server to really play the game. If you were to connect to the authentication server with 1 ip and the game server with a different the game would detect this as a hack and drop you.

Although you can to a point get this to work with proper tuning it tends to be rather tricky. Most times you just assign certain IP to one connection and other ip to the other or you assign certain application to use one or the other.

The only partially automated way some load balance software does is when it sees a new ip from your LAN it will look at the connection utilization at that instant and assign it to the lower used connection. After that it sends all traffic for that ip over that connection no matter what the load becomes in the future.

The only way to really do this is to put hardware on both ends of the connection....ie at the ISP. With 2 ISP it gets close to impossible to really make this work. Still even attempting this just gives you another type of problems with things like packet out of order etc so it is not a trivial issue to solve.